February 4th, 2008

New version of the eBay desktop released

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:10 pm

Categories: Adobe, eBay

Tags: Application, eBay Inc., Desktops, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

Alan Lewis just sent me a note that they’ve released a new version of the eBay desktop in anticipation of a final release as soon as AIR/Flex go live. The new version adds international support so that you can select any eBay site you want (eBay UK, eBay Germany, ect). They’ve had “10s of thousands” of downloads of the application in beta form so it seems to be a hit with eBay’s users.

I’ve heard various people ask what the point of eBay on the desktop is and that “who wants to use eBay offline” but that’s not what the eBay application is about and I still think it stands as a very good use case for AIR. As Alan Lewis has often said, the application is really aimed at providing a better user experience around eBay. The application is a great way to manage auctions and is especially useful for the kind of user who spends a lot of time on the eBay website. AIR is a great technology for companies that want to extract some functionality and provide a more immersive, tailored experience to users than a browser can provide. That’s what the eBay desktop is all about, not so much about being able to do things offline.

October 1st, 2007

eBay and AOL launch AIR applications

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:51 am

Categories: AIR, Adobe, eBay

Tags: Desktop, Web, Application, America Online Inc., eBay Inc., Channel Management, Desktops, Marketing, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

A couple of companies are releasing AIR applications today. eBay’s San Dimas project, what I consider to be the original AIR application, was finally released today at desktop.ebay.com. AOL also released a Top 100 application. It grabs some of the top music videos and then provides a very cool, desktop experience around that content.

I’m really excited to see how the eBay application does. It was one of the first applications out there and eBay is obviously a huge web property. Because they’ve got a lot of web skills and a lot of web infrastructure, I think AIR was a natural fit for their entry into the desktop world. It’s kind of cool to see the desktop.ebay.com URL and know it’s using AIR.

May 30th, 2007

Bidding for the first invite to a Rich Internet Application on eBay

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:54 pm

Categories: Apollo, eBay

Tags: Sign, Internet, Internet Application, eBay Inc., Ryan Stewart

This is kind of cool so I couldn’t pass up the chance to mention it. The San Dimas project, which is the Apollo demo that nearly everyone has seen (and I got a first crack at here) is close to going public beta. In honor of that, the people on the project decided it would be fitting to auction off the very first invite to try it out.

Right now the bidding is up to $214.50 which is mind boggling to me. I’m not sure if it’s a sign that we really do have too much money in the Valley, but I’ll try to take it as a sign that people are just really exited about trying new Rich Internet Applications out. I wonder what they could get if they auctioned off the first invite to the Silverlight New York Times Reader.

RIApedia had the scoop before I did, so thanks to Mike for the tip.

April 10th, 2007

RIA summit: "Unleashing the Power of Rich Internet Applications"

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:43 am

Categories: Adobe, Apollo, Design, Experience, Rich Internet Applications, eBay, effectiveUI

Tags:

Adobe and effectiveUI are putting on a free Rich Internet Application Summit on Thursday, May 3rd, in Denver that I'll be a speaker for. While it's obviously targeted at Adobe products, it's going to be one of the first conference I've seen that focuses on the business side of Rich Internet Applications. There are representatives from Forrester, eBay, and Adobe as well as Anthony Franco, a managing partner at effectiveUI.

The agenda includes topics like the business case for Rich Internet Applications, what kinds of experiences you can create with Apollo, and how important user experience can be when delivering applications over the web or on the desktop. The final session is a panel with all of the speakers talking about the future of RIAs and how they'll affect software. I'm covering the Rich Internet Application ecosystem, so I'll be giving an overview of Adobe's technologies and where they fit. I'll be talking about mobile devices, the web, the desktop, and how RIAs can span all of those for the best reach.

As I said, it's a free event, so if you'll be in Denver on the 3rd of May, you should head on over and register. It runs from 8:30 to 2:00 and is being held at the Adam's Mark Hotel. Even if you weren't planning on being in Denver, it's a great place to take a trip, and this is as good reason to schedule a long weekend of skiing or hiking or just hanging out in the mile high city.

March 7th, 2007

eBay announces an ActionScript SDK

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:30 pm

Categories: Cooqy, Flash, Rich Internet Applications, eBay

Tags:

At this morning's 360 Flex keynote, eBay announced that they have released an ActionScript SDK for eBay's Web Services that will make it easier for Flash and Flex developers to build applications that leverage eBay's web services. Alan Lewis has the full announcement over on the eBay Developer blog, so I got to chat with him about it today.

This comes out of work the team did with their "San Dimas" project, the Apollo application that has been demoed in a number of places and that I covered on this blog. They've essentially released a lot of the more difficult parts behind the application, and they really want to encourage developers to build things like the San Dimas application.

One thing that was interesting to me was that they modified Apache Axis, a project I wasn't familiar with, to auto-generate ActionScript. It saved them a lot of time, and I believe they are planning on releasing the changes so that other Flash developers can use their modified Axis version to help generate ActionScript code for their own projects.

I think this is a great thing for eBay to do. There are a lot of cool things that you can do with eBay's web services (Cooqy is one example) and this helps developers on the Flash Platform quickly jump in. I hope we see more things like San Dimas from the community. Alan was talking to me about some of the feedback they're getting about San Dimas and there are good ideas out there. This means more developers can turn those ideas into applications. And maybe even make some money in the process.

There is more coverage on the release by Tom and Renaun.

February 27th, 2007

Adobe Engage: eBay's Internal Flex Applications

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:42 pm

Categories: Flash, Flex, Rich Internet Applications, eBay

Tags:

eBay has been using Flex for a long time, since the 1.5 days and Tom Ortega is giving us a view of some of their internal monitoring application. This is a refreshing presentation and while the application isn't pretty, it's a look at how Flex does a great job of handling data.

He's showing two applications, an autoimage app and a management consoles which displays computers and users on the network and allows some remote management of them. They've combined the features in those two applications into a new User Interface that is much cleaner and much more intuitive. I don't think I'm allowed to take pictures, but the takeaway is that he's reusing a lot of the Flex components built before and bringing them into their new UI. All with the same backend code, so no changes to their middle tier was required. Tom said that they're looking at open sourcing this solution.

Tom did a great job on this presentation.

December 13th, 2006

How eBay is developing with Adobe's Apollo project

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:41 am

Categories: Adobe, Apollo, Experience, Rich Internet Applications, eBay

Tags:

When people talk about the big internet companies, eBay sometimes seems left out. People consistently talk about the battle between Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft because the "search war" makes for an interesting topic to write about with some big players involved. But while all of that is exciting, companies like Amazon and eBay have been quietly doing some innovative things in the tech world. Amazon has the S3 Storage System and eBay has been experimenting with different technologies to make it easier for their users to buy and sell things on eBay.

One of these experiments is the "San Dimas" project. The most excellent San Dimas project (name courtesy of Bill & Ted) is a child of the eBay Developers Program and EffectiveUI. Alan Lewis, the technical evangelist of the program answered some of my questions about San Dimas and how they are using Apollo. As far as I know, eBay is the only large company that has looked into Apollo. Alan made sure to stress that right now they have no plans to release San Dimas but they are still working on it, so read into that what you will.

Screenshot of "San Dimas"

The San Dimas project leverages the free APIs that eBay opened up for free last year (the APIs have been available for 6 years now) to provide a desktop application for people who want something a little more robust than the eBay website to manage their auctions. Because San Dimas uses Apollo, it can take advantage of the desktop and provide things like local storage and desktop notifications very easily. Alan also mentioned that one of the big advantages of the desktop model is improved caching. For instance there is a web service call to go out and grab the entire tree structure of eBay's categories. In XML format, this is about a 20 meg download. With Apollo, the team can call this once and cache it on the local machine so that the application never has to make the calls to get subcategories. This means fewer calls to the server and better performance.

While San Dimas makes managing auctions easier for the hardened eBay veterans, it's also an experiment in using Flash to make it easy to get started on eBay. You can create an auction and then use the Apollo to connect to your web cam and take pictures of the item you are selling. Those pictures are stored on the hard drive and can be added to the listing. In addition, it allows buyers to search and monitor your current bids. It can also give you desktop notifications for your auctions so you can track it and make sure you win the Wii that you're overpaying for.

The San Dimas project is a sign of how excited people are about Adobe's Apollo. It isn't entirely clear whether or not users will eventually get to use San Dimas but it's been shown at conferences to quite a bit of excitement. It's a fantastic example of the blending desktop and web with one of the webs biggest properties.

December 7th, 2006

360Flex - A conference for RIA developers

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:52 am

Categories: Adobe, Flex, Rich Internet Applications, eBay

Tags:

I'm going to be attending the 360Flex conference March 5-7 this year in San Jose, and since registration just opened, I wanted to let people know about it. I tend to be a big fan of conferences that are more developer focused because I think you learn a lot more and you get to talk to the people that are "in the trenches" and building the applications that we all use. This is exactly that kind of conference and while its focus is on Flex, I would suggest anyone looking at Rich Internet Applications register for it.

The conference is both being held at and sponsored by eBay, which is an indication of how deeply Flex has gotten into the business side of Rich Internet Applications. I'm hoping to find out more about what eBay is doing with Flex, but the little bits I've been able to glean indicate that it's a significant investment. And this seems to be the story across a wide range of industries. Midnight Coders is also a sponsor and they provide Flex Data Services functionality across a wide range of platforms including .NET and PHP. Combine that with the murderer's row of speakers (the list includes some of the best Flex minds in the business) and it means you're going to see examples of Flex being used to build great experiences for Fortune 500 companies, web startups and everything in between.

It has been a great year for Rich Internet Applications. Flex was released a few months ago and has seen a surprisingly large number of applications built for the platform. WPF and WPF/E have both been made available on the Microsoft side which shows how important experience has become. Apollo is coming down the pipeline which will enable a robust desktop RIA solution (much like WPF). Next year should be even better, and this conference is going to be a great way to see what people are doing and how RIAs are changing landscapes all over the spectrum.

Here are the details:

360Flex Conference is scheduled for March 5-7, 2007 at eBay in San Jose, CA. Come join us for this exclusive event and learn Flex from every angle. We are bringing together the best developers for Flex for this event both from within the development community but also within Adobe.

The conference costs $100, special thanks to our corporate sponsors.

360Flex will have 4 tracks as follows:

• Flex 101 - Learn Flex A-Z
• Application - Real-world Flex applications ( Browser & Apollo )
• Integration - Connect Flex to any server (CF,PHP,.NET,JAVA,FDS)
• Components - Create custom Flex components

The speaker list is a whos-who list of the top Flex developers. Confirmed speakers include:
Joe Berkovitz, Christian Cantrell, Mike Chambers, Matt Chotin, Danny Dura, Ben Forta, Ely Greenfield, Ben Lucyk, Mike Melanson, Clint Modien, Tom Ortega, Ted Patrick, Danny Patterson, Grant Skinner, Deepa Subramaniam, Jesse Warden, Jason Williams, David Zuckerman.